Access Provided by University Of Texas-San Antonio at 04/22/11 3:28PM GMT Introduction Jonathan P. Eburne and Rita Felski hat is an avant-garde? In posing such a question, this is- sue of New Literary History seeks to reexamine a category that Woften seems all too self-evident. Our aim is not to draw up a fresh list of definitions, specifications, and prescriptions but to explore the conditions and repercussions of the question itself. In the spirit of analogously titled queries—from Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” to Foucault’s “What is an Author?”—we hope to spur reflection not only on a particular object of study but also on the frameworks and critical faculties that we bring to bear on it. As Paul Mann notes, every critical text on the avant-garde, whether tacitly or overtly, “has a stake in the avant-garde, in its force or destruction, in its survival or death (or both).”1 A reassessment of these stakes is one of the priorities of this special issue. Narratives of the avant-garde abound. Whether they come to bury the avant-garde or to praise it, these narratives are typically organized around moments of shock, rupture, and youthful revolt that speak to certain beliefs about the functions of experimental art and the nature of historical change. In his 1968 Theory of the Avant-Garde, for instance, Renato Poggioli describes two major phases in the development of the avant-garde. The first stage is anchored in the leftist politics of the 1840s and the 1870s, where the notion of an advanced guard serves to authorize the political agitations and underground activities that helped trigger the revolutionary events of 1848 and the Paris Commune. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the mantle of the avant- garde is transferred from politics to aesthetics, as manifested in the new stridency and shock value claimed by art and the self-consciously vanguardist ethos of such movements as Dada, futurism, surrealism, and constructivism. For Poggioli, however, such aesthetic appropriations of the insurrectionary energies of political vanguardism remained largely metaphorical and risked bad faith in exaggerating the circumscribed effects of artistic innovation and intervention.2 This narrative has been widely adopted and adapted in the four de- cades since its publication, and its insistence on the historical priority of a strictly political—and leftist—incarnation of the avant-garde remains influential. From Poggioli’s vantage point in 1968, the meaning of past New Literary History, 2010, 41: v–xv vi new literary history avant-gardes reflected the urgency of contemporary concerns: to what extent could the history of avant-gardes and their oscillation between political and aesthetic goals shed light on the utopian ambitions of the New Left? In our own moment, we may be struck by the fact that this narrative of stages—the “political” moment of the 1840s and 1870s, the “aesthetic” moment of the 1920s, and the “theoretical” moment of the 1960s—persists in imputing a single, overriding agency and intention to avant-garde activity, in spite of the historical differences it acknowledges. Such a narrative tends, in short, to measure the successes of avant-garde activity—and above all, its failures—against a singular criterion of revo- lutionary political transformation. The meanings and consequences of avant-gardes, however, cannot be deduced from the metaphorical resonance of the term itself. Indeed, the militarist aggression and forward movement implicit in the idea of the avant-garde have been questioned almost as frequently as they have been heeded; the amplitude of radical artistic and political practices constitutes a multifaceted history of such renegotiations. And whether the avant-garde represents a discrete moment or series of moments in the intellectual history of modernity or a more diffuse aesthetic or politi- cal ethos, its currency resides as much in the history of grappling with its valences as in the diverse works and movements collected under its name. This special issue proposes, then, that the question “what is an avant-garde?” remains a productive site for methodological and historical invention, and not merely a monument to the glorious past of radical art. For the past few decades, the study of the avant-garde has persistently circled around the question of its death. The parameters for such claims were largely set by Peter Bürger’s obituary to radical art, published a few years after Poggioli’s study in 1974 and translated into English in 1984. In his Theory of the Avant-Garde, Bürger pays tribute to the historical avant-garde’s challenge to the autonomy of art, while underscoring the lessons of its failure. For Bürger, the enshrining of the ready-made in the museum delivers the lesson that it is the institution, rather than a work’s intrinsic qualities, that defines what counts as art. This lesson constitutes both the success of the avant-garde—in denaturalizing artistic genius as the source of aesthetic value—and its inevitable limit. The ease with which the museum incorporates and subsumes all artistic challenges to its authority testifies to the futility of attempts to overcome the functional separation of art and life by eliminating the mediating presence of social institutions. The heroic hopes of the historical avant-garde survive only as an object of present-day nostalgia or melancholy. Meanwhile, the ever more calculated provocations of contemporary artists—testifying to the seemingly limitless selling power of shock—merely underscore the inauthenticity of their insurrectionary postures.3 introduction vii Bürger’s insistence on the finitude of the historical avant-garde (in an argument largely centered on the Dada and surrealist movements of prewar and interwar Europe) is suffused with the imperatives of his own intellectual inheritance, that of Frankfurt School critical theory. The oppositional energies of the avant-garde find their continuation and completion elsewhere—not in the bad-faith gestures of a newly com- modified neo-avant-garde, but in the practice of radical critique itself. Theory, in other words, shoulders the antinomian and anti-institutional role previously assigned to radical art. A similar logic is echoed in the vanguardist aspirations of a range of influential frameworks, from “French theory” to cultural studies, which often define their radical ambitions and interventionist agency in opposition to orthodox beliefs, intellectual traditions, and fixed institutional structures.4 Given its frequent reliance on a rhetoric of innovation and rupture, as well as an anti-institutional animus that may seem questionable in the light of its own implication in structures of higher education, it is not surprising that theory itself—or a certain conception of what counts as theory—is now subject to the same proclamations of obsolescence, exhaustion, and death previously leveled at avant-garde art. The following essays are, for the most part, not especially concerned with salvaging the revolutionary élan of avant-gardism or, for that matter, of critical theory. One goal of the issue is instead to question the pervasive tendency to personify the avant-garde through a biographical narrative of birth, youthful insurrection, and death—a narrative that translates psychologically into a predictable arc of anticipation followed by disap- pointment, and politically into the lexicon of a radical oppositional force that cannot escape its subsequent co-option. Experimental aesthetic and political movements continue to form and develop throughout the world. What is the nature of this persistence—and what new demands does it levy upon contemporary critical practice and our presumptions about historical change? For their part, historical theories of the avant- garde such as those of Bürger and Poggioli underscore the limits of formalist approaches eager to conjure evidence of transgression out of close readings of individual art works. Semiotic and social subver- sion are far from synonymous, and the defiance of artistic convention comes without political guarantees. Yet the subsuming of all avant-garde movements within a single development narrative allots an excessive importance to the avant-garde’s European origins, while condemning all subsequent forms of radical art to repetition, belatedness, and bad faith. In this regard, Hal Foster and others have argued that the all-or- nothing nature of arguments such as Bürger’s takes the revolutionary rhetoric of the avant-garde too much at its own word, overlooking the possibility of muted, qualified, deferred, or different transformations. viii new literary history Indeed, as avant-garde movements develop in new locations and changed historical contexts, they continue to reassess their goals, formulate new ambitions, and develop alternative forms of intellectual, political, and artistic practice.5 Looking beyond a restricted vocabulary of innovation and exhaustion, resistance and commodification, a number of the following essays assess diverse forms of avant-garde activity in terms of what they make possible, rather than rushing to quantify their ultimate success or failure. Even those essays wary of retaining the term “avant-garde” as a synonym for experimental aesthetic or political activity remain interested in exploring how various forms of such activity persist under contemporary conditions. In either case, this shift in focus requires dislodging certain beliefs about the nature of social institutions and the dynamics of historical change. The relationship